La suite

This exhibiton is conceived as the second act of a group show featuring 4 artists dealing with absraction painting within the New York art scene, each one carrying on very distinctive artistic processes. Israel Lund (*1980, New York) creates work by photographing an original silkscreen on raw canvas, transferring the photograph into PDF form with an iPhone application, enlarging and printing out the image, burning it into a larger screen which is eventually silkscreened on raw canvas in layers of cyan, magenta and yellow. Allowing the natural tendencies of his materials to offset his own intentions, Landon Metz (*1985, Phoenix) uses both brush and hand to respond to the dyes. As the pigment soaks into the unprimed canvas, the picture plane becomes a homogeneous textural field, a static document whose elegance, spatial nuance, and visual depth reflect a skillful and deliberate handling of form, scale, and color. His paintings are at once intellectual and intimate, expanding the scope of his formal investigations while inviting the audience to consider the larger discussions of perception, mindfulness, and interconnection that drive his practice. Brussels-based artist Jean Baptiste Bernadet (*1978, Paris) tries to avoid the marks and markers that have come to signify «abstract painting»: big brushy brushwork, gestural sleight-of-hand, etc. Instead his aim is to let the painting itself direct the process by which it is made. An initiating mark, or a color, might act as a hypothesis of sorts, a provisional statement which leads to another, then another. Working by transfers, duplication, erasing, accumulation and exhaustion, more than construction, calligraphy or composition. The rich, precious and complex surface of his paintings should be sufficient, definitely. Olivier Mosset (*1944, Bern) moves to New York in the ‘70s where he begins to paint monochrome paintings that deal with abstraction intended as silence and ineloquence, while questioning the boundaries between art and non-art: he presents himself as a non-painter,as he asserts the fact to make visible the mechanism which makes paint and criticizes the framework institutional art. «The monochrome does not exist. I do paintings. I use paints that I apply to the canvas. In this way the canvas is already marked. The canvas strechted on a frame is already appropriated, is already painting. I don’t know wether this constitutes good painting, but it is painting.»